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From The Springfield News-Leader …

Federal law enforcement officers say they seized 11 guns, a silencer, more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, body armor plates and several pounds of a binary explosive from a Springfield man with ties to the Boogaloo extremist anti-government group.

I subscribe to a bunch of regional papers, mainly in swing states or states that tend to be politically kinetic. It comes in handy at election time and it keeps me up to speed on things outside the national news generally. One of those papers is The Miami Herald. In the DeSantis Era that turns out to be quite a trip. Almost every day I get an email about some new gambit of his, each of which seems aimed generally at paving the way for his 2024 presidential campaign and specifically at owning the libs. That’s his program, essentially.

Like all upstanding Americans I’m eagerly awaiting the first hearing of the House GOP’s new “weaponization of the federal government” investigations committee. That first hearing will feature former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley and what is being presented as an FBI whistleblower of sorts, a former FBI agent named Nicole Parker who says she left the FBI three months ago in the face of growing politicization and unprofessionalism from the FBI brass. She’s now a regular on Fox News. So she’s the one who will reveal how the FBI has become a haven of wokeness during her 12-year tenure.

I looked her up and saw this opinion piece she wrote for Fox News. And in addition to a lot of verbiage about wokeness and how the Bureau changed during her time there, her one example of politicization was fairly revealing. Parker was offended that during the George Floyd protests in D.C. on June 4 a group of FBI agents in tactical gear kneeled before protestors in what they apparently saw as a deescalation effort.

TPM Reader TC has a more optimistic view of the avian flu issue. I don’t think this is really in contradiction with the earlier post. These are not likely scenarios. But the stakes are high enough that we should be prepared even for very unlikely ones. From TC …

Long-time reader here, wanting to throw in my $0.02 regarding Josh’s recent piece ‘Can We Be Ready‘ about the ongoing avian influenza epidemic. For reference, my doctorate focused on improved/next-generation influenza vaccine design. 

Overall, I appreciate Josh’s measured approach to discussing infectious diseases, but would like to make a few additional points:

Perhaps the most important thing about the Chinese surveillance balloon episode is the completely over-the-top reaction to it among the political class, which, in turn, reminds us how the entrenched stupidity of our politics endangers us. I was reminded of this over the weekend when I read this column in the Times by Zeynep Tufekci. If by chance you’re not familiar with her, you should be. She was one of the most insightful and reliable sources of information throughout the pandemic despite not being an epidemiologist or a medical doctor.

Brandon Russell, founder of Atomwaffen, and his girlfriend Sarah Clendaniel have been arrested and charged with a plot to attack a ring of power stations around Baltimore, Maryland in the hope of sowing chaos and triggering the predicted race war at the center of neo-Nazi/white supremacist ideology. FBI Special Agent Thomas J. Sobocinski of the Baltimore field office told reporters there was “no indication” the plot was part of “anything larger.” I assume that’s true as far as it goes. But we’ve seen a wave of these attacks over recent months.

Yesterday we discussed the very limited control you have over a balloon. You have some limited directional control and you control your altitude. But if you’re going east, and you can’t find a wind stream going west, you’re going east. Period. TPM Reader EJ turns out to know a lot about this and he gives us more of a sense of how this works.

I have a commercial license to fly hot air and gas (helium) balloons.

Balloons are ALWAYS at the mercy of the wind they are in. They can NEVER maneuver in any way within that stream of air. However, they have limited ability to maneuver in relation to the ground. They do this by changing to an altitude that has a wind favorable to the direction they want to go. If they want to loiter over an area, they would have to find an altitude where there was zero wind. You almost never find a wind going exactly in the direction you want to go, so you constantly change altitude to, sort of, tack in the direction you want to go, almost like a sailboat trying to sail in a direction upwind.

The Post has an article up that provides a bit more detail on earlier Chinese balloon incursions. The gist seems to be that they’ve skirted U.S. territory a number of times and crossed into U.S. airspace but not as extensively as what happened in this case. The “briefly” in that earlier reference was the key. In a nice bit of additional detail, Florida and Texas were earlier targets.

David Ignatius is a consistently good and informative read. This column is not really an exception. But it’s notable that Ignatius feels the need to kick off with a classic “to be sure” sentence — “an embarrassment for the Biden administration, to be sure” — before going on to explain that shooting the balloon down over the ocean was the most logical course of action and that it will likely yield more intelligence for the United States than for China.

What an embarrassment!

But with so much attention to it I thought it made sense to put together what we actually know and where the story is at.

I’ve been sort of mystified by the apparent Chinese spy balloon over Montana. It seems highly provocative for relatively little intelligence payoff. And it happens at a time when both countries appear to be attempting to at least stabilize tensions. But TPM Reader JS points out that there seems to be another unauthorized and unidentified balloon currently over Costa Rica. Weird!